Wired.com: Inside London’s Secret Crisis-Command Bunker
If nuclear attack or civil breakdown ever threatens the United Kingdom, the heads of government and the military know where to go. Beneath the streets of London, deeper than the capitol’s famous tube system, exists a hidden bunker on constant standby.
Replete with blast doors, a broadcast studio and a giant screen resembling CNN’s massive touchscreen wall on The Situation Room, this nuclear safe house sits in wait for the end of the world. Welcome to the Ministry of Defence’s Crisis Command Center, subterranean England.
David Moore’s series The Last Things documents a complex to which no other photographer has ever gained access. According to Moore, the ministry’s official line is that the Crisis Command Center “doesn’t exist,” which is the case inasmuch as the policy of the ministry is not to discuss its facilities.
“I told the Ministry of Defence, ‘I am not a journalist, I am an artist,’” Moore said in a Skype interview. “That was very important. They needed to know I wasn’t doing an exposé.” Although Moore was unable to confirm or deny the fact, it is widely speculated that The Last Things documents the Pindar complex constructed beneath Whitehall in the 1990s.
As of today the facility has only been used for less-grandiose purposes as a communication center and to play out war-game scenarios. One gets the impression that it is an ill-timed response to a Cold War mentality, with its actual utility uncertain.
Prior to beginning the work in 2006, Moore enlisted the help of Angela Weight, former Keeper of Art at the Imperial War Museum in London. Together they lobbied ministry officials. “We had a series of meetings, slowly climbing the hierarchy of authority,” said Moore.
Always accompanied by a low-ranking officer, the photographer had a loose agreement about what he could and could not shoot. It was clear when certain doors were to remain locked.
“At a point, I wondered if I was being sold a lie — if I was being shown things that weren’t actually in operation,” he said. As the project progressed, however, his paranoia waned.
To this day, Moore is not certain why he was granted entry’ He was only told by a ministry official that his work “fell within operational guidelines.” By prior agreement, the ministry received several of Moore’s prints for its permanent art collection, which probably sweetened the deal.
Moore has been led to believe no other freelance photographer will ever gain access to the site, though interestingly, the ministry does employ its own in-house photographers, whose photos are presumably for use in internal reports.
Upon completion of the project, Moore and the Ministry of Defence convened for a censorship panel. No images could be — or have been — released without ministry approval.
“I was asked to digitally manipulate some of the images,” said Moore. “Door numbers [were redacted]. We haggled over descriptions and captions.”
As Weight describes in her afterword to The Last Things, “There was to be no compromise [on captions]; any form of linkage or association, such as the word ‘government’ for example, was firmly denied.”
The negotiations became part of Moore’s process. He came to think of these amendments as things added, not taken away: “I dedicate a page in the book to describing the changes I’ve made. I make it obvious.”
The Last Things continues Moore’s portfolio of works on secret and relevant state infrastructure. “My work is not nostalgic,” says Moore. “My photographs are always of live spaces. The crisis command center is not mothballed.” He’s previously taken a forensic view of the Britain’s Houses of Parliament and has since photographed the top-security jail cells for terrorist suspects inside Paddington Green Police Station, London. Moore is currently working on access to other classified sites that remain unnamed.
“My work shows hidden spaces,” he said. “I want to use photography as a democratic tool. Looking at state apparatus and panoptic sites, I see my work as an act of visual democracy.”
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The Last Things, with texts by Chris Petit & Angela Weight is published by Dewi Lewis (2008). It is Moore’s third book.
Listen to a podcast of David Moore speaking about The Last Things at Belfast Exposed.
All photos © David Moore.
Tags: Crisis Command Center, David Moore, London, Ministry of Defence, Nuclear Attack, The Last Things
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Photo Enlargers Loom Like Dinosaurs of the Film Age
By Pete Brook January 18, 2011 | 3:13 pm | Categories: Gear, Photo Gallery, Studios, history
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Lab owner: Adrian Ensor
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There were 204 photo printing labs in and around London in 2006, printing images from film stock to paper. By 2009, only six remained.
In each of these labs’ darkrooms were photo enlargers, themselves quite large, that projected the images from film negatives onto a piece of photo paper. Richard Nicholson’s series Analog — The Last One Out, Please Turn On the Light is a requiem for these hulking machines, now gradually wending their way to obscurity and landfill.
For over a century, the vast infrastructure of film photography was steadily growing and evolving, but the rise of digital equipment over the last decade has forced it to decay exponentially. In many cases it’s disappearing entirely. Polaroid film has already been discontinued, and just last month the last rolls of Kodachrome were processed at Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas.
Just because the use of analog printing tools is shrinking, however, doesn’t mean it will die altogether. As black-and-white printer Jim Margeree has reminded us, there is still a lot to talk about “beyond the trite ‘analog vs. digital’ clichés.” There is too much chatter about death in photography, and for photojournalism in particular. Nicholson’s Analog is a celebration as much as it is a goodbye.
Nicholson spoke with Raw File about his motives, his challenges, his own use of analog and digital technologies and just what happened to those giant enlargers:
Wired.com: Why this subject?
Richard Nicholson: I love darkrooms. My father built one when I was a child and introduced me to photography. I’ve always enjoyed printing my own work.
In 2006, the hire darkroom I was using became very quiet. Canon had just released the 5D camera and photographers were rushing to switch from film to digital. London labs were closing in quick succession.
The writing was on the wall for film, but I didn’t want to let it go. I started looking at the darkroom in a new light. I was most interested in the enlargers — hulking specimens of modernist industrial design. It struck me they had a human scale and form: a neck, head, two armatures. I felt sorry for them.
Each craft used to have its own highly engineered machines, but these have been rendered obsolete by the computer. I’m no Luddite. I wouldn’t turn the back the clock, but I think the crafts and these machines deserve to be remembered.
The project focuses on the darkrooms of professional printers. I wanted to photograph lived-in spaces. The personal details soften the hard lines of the machinery.
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